


like i remember

by kinnoth



Series: sleep cycle [1]
Category: The Libertines
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-28
Updated: 2009-09-28
Packaged: 2017-10-27 06:50:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinnoth/pseuds/kinnoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the middle of the nights, when he's alone, when it's silent that Carl has the hardest time keeping himself alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like i remember

**the horrorshow one**

Some people have picture albums in their minds to keep them company before they fall asleep - Carl's got a horrorshow. It curves around the inside of his skull like a fucking IMAX screen, flickering static from violence to cruelty to endless blinking _yours, yours, yours_ in loops that threaten to bleed from his eyes like salt.

He'd prefer the pictures, a less familiar form of celluloid than his film-footage life. But that's not how things work.

The most important parts of him aren't the most serviceable, what photographs and music and permissible self-expression can leech from under his skin. The defining parts are those even he can't quite grasp or find a way to ensnare and mutilate and sell away -

_(elusive wild beasts whose shadows are only legendary and whose pelts would be a devastation)_

\- they're the momentary clench of fingers to wire just before a surge of adrenaline, the fleeting whispering words that fight at his tongue but never make it past his lips, the dull tipped bruises in the curl of his palm where Carl shoves his fingers in to keep them from reaching out, remembering, forgiving.

Because it's the middle of the nights, when he's alone, when it's silent that Carl has the hardest time keeping himself alive.

His bed becomes a trap of reproduced sensation: the sheets _(his hands)_ wrap around his arms too tightly but when he shoves _(battles)_ them back, he misses their constriction

_(because they'd held him into place at least, kept him still and looking forward so he'd never catch the bogeyman's eye looking into himself)_

A pillow to his face would stop his breathing, stop his thinking, but then he'd have to go with the smell of stale sweat and laundry in his nostrils

_(like a euphemism - he wants to die but would rather not have it done with the imagined scent of his executioner still caught as a last breath in his lungs)_

What Carl fights against every second of every minute isn't oblivion, it's memory; blurred colours and murmured words of his day distorted into mirrored knives and possibilities, contingencies, shouting fault and blame and angry accusations that quicken his imagination, make it difficult for the him at tomorrow's buzzer to figure dream or delusion or past.

The drink had helped, when he was able, but that crutch has finally snapped under years of abuse. Sobriety makes him sharper in the daylight, sparkle in the daytime, but it keeps him on the edge of sleep at night, where he wants nothing more than forgetfulness or, barring that, eternity. There is static in his head so consuming it's not unlike the insides of a womb, giving birth to impure demons and twisted angels and the want for ceasefire; because in the dark, in the silence, _loathing_ becomes an active verb and there are no such things as nouns any more, only ways in which they can hurt him if he stops hurting himself.

He hates this almost more than he hates himself, hates the fighting because it means that of the two things in the world that can make everything else disappear, one of them won't have a thing to do with him.

And he's only got that one thing right now.

Of the many things that do not disappear when the lights go out, Carl's unforgiving and inextricable pride is one of them, though between it and his life, he'd side with destruction any day.

_(I miss you most in the dark)_


End file.
